Architects of our own Destiny: Lessons from the Strike Wave of 1933-34 (original) (raw)
There are those who argue that the New Deal enabled the rise of militant industrial unions in the United States (see for example Finegold and Skocpol 1984; cf. Goldfield 1989). Politicians like Robert Wagner and Franklin Roosevelt, they say, gifted collective bargaining rights to workers, and workers in turn were the happy and passive beneficiaries of the New Deal’s generosity. I argue the reverse. In the time of the Great Depression and the Saylesville Massacre, it was precisely the inability of the New Deal to address labor rights that led to labor militance. Labor militance, in turn, prompted the Democratic Party to do all that it could to establish industrial peace by passing the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.
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